Jay Robb reviews business books

Book review: Credibility -- how leaders gain and lose it

This review first ran in the Jan. 15 edition of the Hamilton Spectator.

Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It

By  James Kouzes and Barry Posner

Jossey-Bass

$33.95

Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words.

Be careful of your words, for your words become your deeds.

Be careful of your deeds, for your deeds become your habits.

Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character.

Be careful of your character, for your character becomes your destiny.

And to this sage advice, authors and leadership scholars James Kouzes and Barry Posner offer one more pearl of wisdom.

Be careful of your leadership, for your leadership becomes your legacy.

“Read these six simple lines at the start of every day,” say Kouzes and Posner in their new and revised book. “They will remind you that what you do as a leader begins in your mind, gets expressed in your words, and then gets translated into your actions. Over time, those actions become who you are, determine the credibility you earn, and shape the legacy you leave.”

If you’re a leader in need of something more concrete, here’s what 75,000 people say are the top characteristics of admired leaders. Whether surveyed in 2010, 2002 or 1987, folks the world over have selected honesty, forward-looking, inspiring and competence as the four must-have leadership traits.

Drawing on more than three decades of research, Kouzes and Posner say that honesty remains the most important leadership attribute.  Honest leaders earn our respect. They do what they say and deliver on their promises and commitments. “Honesty is absolutely essential to leadership. If people are going to follow someone willingly, whether into battle or into the boardroom, they first want to assure themselves that the person is worthy of their trust.”

All of us continually ask the same question about our organizational and political leaders. Does this person deserve our trust?

“If your answer is yes, then follow,” advise Kouzes and Posner. “Even if your endeavour is unsuccessful, you will still respect yourself. If your answer is ‘I don’t know,” get more information and get it fast. But if your answer is no, find another job or find another leader.”

As for the other top traits, admired leaders are forward looking and know how to communicate a clear and compelling vision of how things could and should be.  Admired leaders are inspiring, dynamic, uplifting, enthusiastic, positive and optimistic. And admired leaders are competent. They have a winning track record with the skills and know-how to get the job done.  Nothing destroys our confidence in a leader quite like swashbuckling overconfidence combined with a frightening lack of ability.

The common theme running through these traits is credibility. “People everywhere want to believe in their leaders. They want to have faith and confidence in them as people. People want to believe that their leaders’ words can be trusted, that they have the knowledge and skills necessary to lead, and that they are personally excited and enthusiastic about the direction in which they are headed.”

Credible leaders inspire loyalty and commitment. Less than credible leaders get only compliance from disengaged followers.

“It is the credibility of the leadership that determines whether people will volunteer a little more of their time, talent, energy, experience, intelligence, creativity and support in order to achieve significant improvement levels. Managers can threaten people with the loss of jobs if they don’t get with the program, but threats, power and position do not earn commitment. They earn compliance. And compliance produces adequacy – not greatness.”

To earn and sustain credibility, Kouzes and Posner have identified six disciplines for leaders.   

1. Discover yourself. What do you believe in? What do you stand for?  Do you have the confidence to deliver? The will and skill to persist in the face of adversity and uncertainty?

2. Appreciate your constituents. “Leadership is a dialogue, not a monologue,” say XXX. We’re more likely to trust and follow a leader who has our best interests at heart.

3. Affirm shared values. Admired leaders have a gift for staking out common ground on which we can all stand and get along with one another.

4. Develop capacity. “People cannot contribute to the aims and aspirations of an organization if they do not know what to do, and they cannot contribute if they do not know how to do it.”

5. Serve a purpose. “Leadership is a service. Leaders exist to serve a purpose for the people who have made it possible for them to lead.”

6. And sustain hope. “An upbeat attitude is always essential, and it’s even more important in troubling times. People with high hope have higher aspirations and higher levels of performance.” When times are rough, we want leaders who are personally there for us.

Follow these six disciplines of credibility and Kouzes and Posner say you’ll join the ranks of admired leaders. You’ll earn our trust. Gain our respect. Win our support. And we’ll help you do something amazing that leaves a remarkable legacy. 

Book review: Why People Fail - The 16 Obstacles to Success and How You Can Overcome Them

This review first ran in the Jan. 3 edition of The Hamilton Spectator.

Why People Fail: The 16 Obstacles to Success and How You Can Overcome Them

By Siimon Reynolds

Jossey-Bass

$29.99

It’s been 15 years since I talked with my dad and I’d give anything for a do-over.

My dad was 50 and going through the worst and last week of his life. On a Monday morning in late October he went to the nearest emergency department. By Monday afternoon, his bloodwork came back and he was immediately admitted to hospital.  On Tuesday came the diagnosis of leukemia and pneumonia. On Wednesday, my dad signed off on the Hail Mary pass of a clinical trial offered only to patients with no shot at a full recovery. On Thursday, my dad asked to meet with each of his kids.

I sat on the edge of the hospital bed and talked about plans to spend more time together. In between rounds of chemo, we’d go to ball games, take road trips and rent summer cottages.

But my dad didn’t want to talk about the future. He wanted to say goodbye. Unlike the rest of us, he knew the game was over and the battle was lost before it had even started. In less than 48 hours, he was taken off life support in the intensive care unit.

If I could somehow get another half hour with my dad, I’d skip the plans and tell him I was proud of what he’d achieved from a lousy start in life and grateful for the sacrifices he’d made to give his family a far better life. I’d show him the photos of his grandkids and then I’d ask a question.

Suppose you were told at my age that there were only seven years left on the clock. How would you have spent your days? What would you have found the courage to say and do? What bonds would you have strengthened and which connections would you have cut? What dreams would you have chased? Would you have re-examined and re-ordered your priorities? What would have mattered most and least?

These are questions that some of us never ponder until we too are on our deathbed. And for that, we pay a very steep price. We muddle through life, float along in our careers and leave a lot of our promise and potential unfulfilled.

Not asking the right questions is one of 16 obstacles to success identified by author and coach Siimon Reynolds. “If you want a premium-quality life, you need to ingrain in your mind a series of high-quality questions that you regularly ask yourself – questions that support you in your attempt to create the very best life possible for you and the people you most care for. These habitual questions will help you stay on the right track, be more optimistic and take the best daily actions to help you reach the life of your dreams.”

Here’s one of the big questions. When you die, what kind of life would you like to have lived? “Most people hate thinking about death,” says Reynolds.  “But keeping death regularly in mind is one of the very best ways to ensure a wonderful life. The thought of death is the world’s greatest wake-up call.” Reynolds says research shows most people on their deathbeds wished they have taken more risks, had more fun, loved more and spent more time with friends.

Along with failing to ask the right questions, other common obstacles to success include having an unclear purpose, destructive thinking, low productivity, a fixed rather than a growth mindset, weak energy, poor presentation skills, poor-image, mistaking IQ for emotional intelligence, not enough thinking, no daily rituals, few relationships, lack of persistence, money obsession and not focusing on strengths.

“Look at anyone you know who is not succeeding and you will find not just one but several of these failure signs occurring in their life,” says Reynolds. These obstacles aren’t insurmountable or permanent. Reynolds says we need to identify the obstacles that apply to us. Tackle each obstacle one at a time. Design a ritual to overcome them. And do something every day, no matter how small, that gets us closer to victory.

“If someone has achieved more than you, it’s not usually because they are better than you or smarter than you. It’s because they have discovered a better strategy for success. What they have learned, you can learn. What they have succeeded with, so too can you if you learn the formulas for success. Some of these formulas are mental and others are practical and action oriented but all of them can be mastered by those dedicated to the task.”

Despite Reynolds’ enthusiasm for negative ion generators, baroque music, green vegetable powdered drinks, inspiration walls and daily self-affirmations, this is a good primer if you’re looking to make a change for the better in 2012 and make the most of whatever time you have left on the clock.

Book review: Good strategy / bad strategy

This review first ran in the Dec. 19th edition of The Hamilton Spectator.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

By Richard Rumelt

Crown Business

$33

Not to put a damper on the holiday season but what’s the worst that could happen to your organization in 2012?

Maybe it’ll be the year of the exodus, with customers and clients defecting to competitors and upstarts. Maybe 2012 will be the year of disappearing margins thanks to soaring costs and sinking revenues. If you’re government funded, brace yourself for the year of fiscal restraint and budget cuts. This could also be the year that disruptive technology renders your business model obsolete. Or maybe the threat will come from within, whether it’s early onset of organizational inertia or wholesale disengagement among the rank and file.

With any luck, your strategic plan makes passing mention of the stormy weather headed your way. If you’re truly blessed, your plan marshals your organization’s greatest strengths to tackle the biggest threat you’re about to face in 2012.

But if your plan’s an unholy mess of muddled motherhood statements and an exhausting laundry list of competing projects and priorities, you’re ringing in the new year saddled with a bad strategy.

“A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision,” says Harvard educated author and management consultant Richard Rumelt.  “A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them. And the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect.”

Rumelt says the problem with bad strategy is that it serves up a big-picture overall direction divorced from any specific actions. There’s no competitive punch. This creates a yawning chasm between strategy and implementation. “If you accept this chasm, most strategy work becomes wheel spinning. A strategy that fails to define a variety of plausible and feasible immediate actions is missing a critical component.”

Along with a failure to face the challenge at hand, bad strategy is stuffed with fluff or what Rumelt calls inflated and unnecessarily abstruse Sunday words. Fluff is used to create the illusion of high-level critical thinking. The obvious gets restated with a heavy dose of buzzwords.

Rumelt warns we’re susceptible to leading our organizations down three well-travelled paths to bad strategy.

The first is a failure to choose. Good strategy is as much about what your organization decides not to do as it is about what it chooses to do. Any coherent strategy invests resources toward some ends and away from others. To have a focused strategy, you need to make tough choices and hard calls. Egos will get bruised. Pet projects will get shelved. Fiefdoms will shrink. The refusal to choose is how you wind up with an unworkable laundry list of projects that scatter scarce resources to the wind.

“A long list of ‘things to do’ often mislabeled as ‘strategies’ or ‘objectives’ is not a strategy,” says Rumelt. “It is just a list of things to do. Such lists usually grow out of planning meetings in which a wide variety of stakeholders make suggestions as to things they would like to see done. Rather than focus on a few important items, the group sweeps the whole day’s collection in the ‘strategic plan’. Then, in recognition that it’s a dog’s dinner, the label ‘long term’ is added so that none of them need to be done today.”

Along with an inability or unwillingness to make hard choices, a second pathway to bad strategy is the siren song of strategy templates peddled by an army of consultants and authors. These templates have organizations fill in the blanks for a unique vision of the future, a high-sounding mission, non-controversial values and some aspirational goals masquerading as strategies. “This path offers a one-size-fits-all substitute for the hard work of analysis and coordinated action,” says Rumelt.  “You will find pious statements of the obvious presented as if they were decisive insights.”

And the final common pathway to bad strategy is what Rumelt calls New Thought. It’s the mistaken belief that all you need to succeed is a positive mental attitude. You know you’re a New Thought follower if you have motivational posters on your office walls reminding you to reach for the impossible or that quitters never win and winners never quit.  

New Thought followers are also big on the absolute need for everyone in an organization to fully commit to a shared vision. But Rumelt says ascribing the success of companies like Apple “to a vision shared at all levels, rather than to pockets of outstanding competence mixed with luck, is a radical distortion of history.”

A belief that you can think your way to success is a form of psychosis says Rumelt and one that he cannot recommend as a sound approach to good strategy. “The doctrine that one can impose one’s visions and desires on the world by the force of thought alone retains a powerful appeal to many people. Its acceptance displaces critical thinking and good strategy.”

This is a brilliant and challenging book and one of the best from 2011. Rumelt is wickedly smart, pulls no punches and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. His book is also a must-read if you want to rewrite your strat plan and better prepare for the risks and opportunities headed your way in 2012. Make this a last minute addition to your holiday wish list.

 

Book review: Persuasion

This review fist ran in the Dec. 5 edition of The Hamilton Spectator.

Persuasion: A New Approach to Changing Minds

By Arlene Dickinson

Collins ($32.99)

A neighbour is up against the same challenge our family faced a few years ago. It was a challenge that put our powers of persuasion to the test.

We live in a neighbourhood where a bylaw blocks the conversion of family homes into monster houses overrun with students.

But the bylaw, with its variance application form, $1,040 fee and committee hearing, can easily unnerve, discourage and dissuade families who want to give their postwar bungalows a much needed extreme home makeover.

We loved the neighbourhood so we opted to go through the process. A neighbour on another street opposed our plans to add a second storey and got a few other folks to write letters of opposition.  

We read those letters for the first time while waiting to go into our committee hearing. Our neighbour was waiting too and brought along hired help to shoot down our plans. During our hearing, the committee asked if we’d reconsider and scale back our renovations. We were told to come back for a second meeting where a decision would be made after committee members had paid a visit to our home and talked amongst themselves.

And that’s when I decided to get persuasive.  I went door to door, getting every homeowner on our street to sign a petition supporting our proposed six figure investment in their neighbourhood. I pulled together a presentation with pictures of all the two-storey homes on surrounding streets. In my cover letter to the committee, I said our family would be on the move if the renovation wasn’t approved. We’d take up residence and pay taxes in Burlington. And I’d make a point of handing the keys over to one of the out-of-town landlords who were forever calling and writing with offers to buy our house sight unseen.

We got the green light to renovate. We spent a small fortune and put down roots. A few other neighbours with growing families have done the same.

As I discovered, there’s nothing that sharpens the power of persuasion more than a challenge to the hopes and dreams we hold for our families.

That same challenge worked wonders for author, marketing expert and Dragon’s Den co-star Arlene Dickinson.

Dickinson was 16 when she graduated from high school. She got a job instead of going on to college or university. At 19, she got married. At 27, she was raising four kids and working a string of jobs in a small town while her husband went to university. When she was 30, Dickinson had an affair that ended her marriage, got her excommunicated from the Mormon church and separated her from her children.

The family court judge told Dickinson that if she wanted full custody of her children, she’d need to get a place to live and prove she could financially support her kids.

“Shock, anguish, grief, remorse – those words don’t even begin to cover how I felt,” says Dickinson. “I remember weeping on my dad’s couch for days.”

Fortunately her father was a great persuader. “He helped me understand that this was the pivotal moment in my life, the moment that would determine what kind of future my kids had and what role I would play in it. If I gave up on myself, I was essentially giving up my kids for good.”

A stint selling ads for a Calgary TV station led to an offer to join Venture, a start-up marketing firm. Ten years after her father persuaded her to get off the couch, she became CEO. And 13 years after that, she was starring on the Dragon’s Den.

Dickinson shares her story to reinforce the importance of being authentic.  “You don’t need to tell others your life story to establish authenticity. But you do need to be honest with yourself, take responsibility for your choices and own your weaknesses as well as your strengths. When people feel they’re dealing with a real person who isn’t hiding behind excuses or a mask, who’s presenting a face to the world that’s genuine, they know they’re dealing with someone they can trust.”

And that trust is key to principled persuasion. Along with being true to yourself, you must be truthful with others. “Long term, honesty isn’t just the best policy. It’s also the most persuasive one.”

Dickinson says persuasion is a great test of character. What we’re willing to do and say and how far we’ll go to convince others speaks to our strengths and the reliability of our moral compass.

Dickinson also gets into the mechanics of effective persuasion.  Before you make your pitch for a new job, venture capital or a second storey addition for your home, you need to prepare. The will to prepare trumps the will to win when it comes to persuasion.

“At least half of what makes you persuasive occurs before you ever even open your mouth. Before you utter a word, you need to prepare, you need to rein in your ego, and you need to figure out what’s driving the other party. What’s motivating them? What do they want? How do they view the situation?”

Dickinson offers a wealth of practical advice and hard-earned wisdom on how to change minds. “Everyone has potential and is capable of realizing it. Becoming a good persuader is a great start. That’s a skill that can take you far.”

Dickinson is proof of that.

Book review: The High-Beta Rich -- How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble and Bust

This review ran in the Nov. 21 edition of the Hamilton Spectator.

The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble and Bust

By Robert Frank

Crown Business ($30)

Tim Blixseth grew up poor in rural Oregon with a rusty spoon in his mouth. Edra was a single mom at 17 who worked the night shift at a diner.  They met back in the 1970s at a restaurant Edra managed.

Fast forward to 2006. The former welfare kid was now one of America’s wealthiest men with a net worth estimated at $1.2 billion. The Blixseth’s had made their fortune on timber and real estate and ran an exclusive golf and ski resort in Montana for millionaires and billionaires.

The Blixseth’s owned seven homes, a private island in the Caribbean, a castle in France, two yachts, Gulfstream jets and his and her Rolls Royce Phantoms.  They employed 110 staff.

The Blixseth’s had taken up residence with other freshly minted billionaires and millionaires in a nation that author and Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank calls Richistan.

Richistan is home to the high beta rich. They’re the by-product of a financial system that rewards extreme risk-taking, borrowing, speculation and spending. The super-rich no longer make things or own businesses. They owe their fortunes to stocks, deals and financial engineering.

Frank says the fortunes of the high beta rich have become as monumental and seemingly permanent as their 30,000 square foot fortresses that they call home.

But their success and wealth is built on an illusion. The high beta rich are like human tech stocks, prone to wild swings and rapid cycles of value creation and destruction. Back in 2008, the value creation cycle kicked into a downward spiral. The residents of Richistan panicked. 

By mid-2009, America’s millionaires had lost about a third of their fortunes in the greatest one-time destruction of wealth since the 1930s. Incomes for the top one per cent of earners in the U.S. fell three times as much as they did for American earners as a whole.

By the winter of 2010, the party was over for the overextended Blixseth’s. The real estate market crashed. The Montana resort went under and was sold for less than 10 per cent of its appraised value.  They couldn’t cover a $375 million loan. Their 110 staff were let go. Even the phone service was cut off. Tim and Edna divorced and Edna filed for personal bankruptcy, going from rags to riches to rags.

While it’s hard to shed a tear for the Blixseth’s, Frank says we should all be afraid of what’s happening to the high beta rich. Very afraid.

“While these shocks may seem irrelevant and even amusing to the rest of us, they will increasingly reverberate through our financial and political life as the rich dominate more and more of the economy and funding for governments. Rather than viewing the financial crisis as a narrow escape for the rich, it may have been a warning that the worst is yet to come.”

While trickle-down economics is dismissed in most quarters, trickle down losses are proving very real. “As go the high-beta wealthy, so goes the rest of the country.”

By 2010, the top-earning five per cent of American households accounted for 37 per cent of all consumer outlays. The wealthy are the dominant spenders in the U.S. consumer economy.  So when the rich suddenly stop spending by choice or circumstance, the economy takes a massive hit and lots of us wind up out of work.

The high beta rich also backstop governments. In the U.S., the top one per cent of Americans pay more than 38 per cent of federal income taxes while the bottom 40 per cent pay little or no tax.

An increasing share of government programs will depend on the fortunes made and lost by a minority of high beta rich. “The masses at the bottom require increased funding for entitlements and social programs,” says Frank. “But those at the top, who are increasingly paying for those programs, will exert an outsize influence on politicians through their money and will lobby for lower taxes. The result is that governments will have more booms and busts and permanent deficits.”

Unfortunately, there’s no easy fix for high beta wealth. “To solve the problem requires solving two much bigger problems: the financialization of wealth and rising inequality,” says Frank. Governments show little interest in reigning in financial markets and economists can’t agree on a cause, much less a solution, to economic inequality.

“The issues get reduced to oversimplified debates about taxing the rich or shrinking government or punishing Goldman Sachs – all of which may be politically satisfying and maybe even helpful, but far from a solution.”

Frank does offer some survival tips for those of us not living in Richistan.

To better predict where spending, taxes and jobs are headed and avoid nasty surprises, we need to watch the stock market rather than traditional economic measures. 

Governments, companies and individuals need to take money off the table, saving more during booms so we can ride out busts.

We need to stop acting rich and being fooled by all that glitters. Wealth doesn’t solve problems; it just creates different ones and not only for the residents of Richistan.

“These tips won’t rid us of high-beta wealth or its contagion,” says Frank. “But they might allow us to build better financial and psychological levees to protect us against the coming storms and floods.”

Book review: The Coming Jobs War

This review first ran in the Nov. 7 edition of The Hamilton Spectator.

The Coming Jobs War

By Jim Clifton

Gallup Press

$27.50

If you go by the results from the latest Forum Research poll, 65 per cent of us will be voting for a new mayor in Hamilton's 2014 municipal election.

That gives us 36 months to find ourselves a candidate.

Some of us will settle for a recycled politician or media personality who could bring some measure of name recognition to the mayoral race. 

But what if we broke with tradition and instead recruited a business leader from the private sector?

A leader who'd bring a wealth of senior executive experience, business acumen and an entrepreneurial spirit to council chambers.

A leader who’d be a champion of entrepreneurs and small business owners.

A leader who’d make our city the start-up capital of Canada, where small business was the business of Hamilton.

A leader who'd have a singular focus on creating good-paying, sustainable, knowledge economy jobs for Hamiltonians.

A leader who wouldn't spend a dime of taxpayer money on anything that didn't create jobs.

And a leader who’d rally business and civic leaders to drive down high school drop-out rates and build up a highly skilled, entrepreneurial workforce.

This is exactly the sort of leader who'd win the vote of author and Gallup chairman Jim Clifton.

“If you have a weak mayor, your city is going down,” warns Clifton. “If you have mediocre city council members, your city is going down. If you have a humble set of leaders on your school board, your city is going down.”

Sounds extreme but Clifton says the stakes are high. We’re heading into an all-out global war for good jobs. Right now, there are 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs in the world. But there are three billion people who are working or looking for work. That leaves us 1.8 billion jobs short.

“If you were to ask me, from all the world polling Gallup has done for more than 75 years, what would fix the world – what would suddenly create worldwide peace, global wellbeing, and the next extraordinary advancements in human development, I would say the immediate appearance of 1.8 billion jobs – formal jobs. Nothing would change the current state of humankind more.”

Cities will be on the frontlines in the global war for jobs, says Clifton.  Cities are where entrepreneurs connect with innovators, commercialize ideas, launch start-ups and grow the small and medium-sized private sector companies that create the majority of new jobs.

To win the jobs war, a city needs to get its act together. All the key players  -- all politicians, every business and local institution – need to be on the same page, fully engaged and aligned.

“Everybody in charge of anything needs to focus on job creation. If they divert their attention, vote them out. Be ruthless. If the bike path doesn’t have anything to do with job creation, there is no bike path. The jobs war is what should get city leaders up in the morning, what they should work on all day and what should keep them from getting to sleep at night.”

Cities that win the jobs war won’t be looking to other levels of government for handouts, says Clifton. “Free money eventually makes you more dependent. Free money, entitlements, more bureaucracy, less of your control – all these things make individual initiative, meritocracy and free enterprise weaker and less competitive. You have to jumpstart your city yourself.”

Winning cities will have mobilized what Clifton calls their local tribal leaders.  “All prosperous cities have a self-organized, unelected group of talented people influencing and guiding them. These are people who care very much about the success of their city.” Tribal leaders are loyal, highly successful, usually wealthy, respected and well-known. They have the influence, money, connections, speed and access to create jobs.

And along with waging an all-out war for jobs, winning cities will open a second front to battle high school drop-out rates. Clifton says cities should aim to cut drop-out rates in half by doubling student hope.

“Gallup has found that kids drop out of school when they lose hope to graduate. The reason they lose hope of graduating is because they don’t feel excited about what’s next in their lives. Having no vision or excitement for the future is the cause of dropping out of school.

“Parents, teachers and mentors would be wise to consider managing a student’s confidence and hope as much as or more than the mechanics of division and multiplication. And the prize for a student is not graduating but rather a job – even better, an exciting career.”

Along with building confidence and hope, cities need to foster an entrepreneurial spirit within their young people. “The scarcest, rarest, hardest energy and talent in the world to find is entrepreneurship. Innovation by itself has no value until it is chosen by talented entrepreneurs.

“If the image of free enterprise and entrepreneurship is going up among your youth, you will experience job creation. If it is trending down, may God be with you.”

The Coming Jobs War should be required reading and a call to action for Hamilton’s tribal leaders. If Clifton has it right, this is the group that will decide whether Hamilton wins or loses the global jobs war.  We’ll never be the best place to raise a child if we’re not the best place to get a job, start a business and grow a company.

For Hamilton to win the jobs war, we desperately need our tribal leaders to lead the charge in cutting high school drop out rates in half, fostering an entrepreneurial spirit in our next generation of Hamilton employees and business owners, and recruiting a 2014 mayoral candidate who will make job creation job one.  

Book review: Boomerang -- Travels in the New Third World

This review first ran in The Hamilton Spectator on Oct. 24.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

By Michael Lewis

W.W. Norton and Company

$30

You walk into a room.

The room’s dark. No one else is around.

In the middle of the room is a huge pile of someone else’s money.

So what do you do?

Walk away empty handed or stuff all of your pockets with borrowed cash?

Author Michael Lewis can make an educated guess based on what he’s witnessed as a financial disaster tourist. In his latest book, the author of Moneyball, The Blind Side and Big Short recounts his visits to Iceland, Ireland, Greece and California where bankers, politicians, unions and citizens appear to have lost their minds in a mass delusion.

“The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon,” says Lewis. “It was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

“Entire countries were told the lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.”

In Iceland, they stopped fishing, became investment bankers, turned their country into a hedge fund, went on a spending spree and racked up losses of $100 billion, or $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman and child.

In Ireland, a single bank ran up $3.4 trillion in losses. “The Irish used foreign money to conquer Ireland,” says Lewis. “Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was buy Ireland. From each other.”

When the real estate bubble burst, the country’s entire banking system collapsed and the government stuck Ireland’s citizens with the bill in what Lewis calls a suicidal decision.

The Greeks turned their country into a piñata stuffed with cash and invited as many of their 11 million citizens as possible to take a whack. The average government worker earns three times more than the average worker in the private sector. Along with $400 billion of outstanding government debt, there’s another $800 billion owing for pensions. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout is more of a gesture than a solution, says Lewis.

But it’s not just countries that are sliding into default. Municipalities are in a heap of trouble.

Lewis paid a visit to San Jose, which has the highest per capital income of any city in the United States after New York. It’s one of the few cities in the U.S. with a triple-A rating from Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s.

And it’s close to going bankrupt.

Lewis spent time with the city’s mayor Chuck Reed. “He’s got a problem so big that it overwhelms ordinary politics: the city owes so much more money than it can afford to pay its employees that it could cut its debts in half and still wind up broke.”

San Jose’s budget turns on the pay of its public safety workers. Police and firefighters account for 75 per cent of the city’s discretionary spending.

“Over the past decade, the city had repeatedly caved to the demands of its public safety unions,” says Lewis. “What politician wants to spat publicly with police officers and fire fighters?”

The mayor told Lewis that when the police or fire department of any neighbouring city struck a better deal for itself, it became a fresh argument for improving the pay of San Jose police and fire and the starting point for the next round of negotiations.

But it’s not just pay hikes that are crippling San Jose. Pension costs for retired city workers are soaring. In 2002, pension costs were projected to run $73 million a year. Those costs are now pegged at $245 million. Pension and health costs of retired workers account for more than half the city’s budget.

The city is legally obligated to cover those costs so deep cuts are happening across the board. The workforce is down from 7,450  to 5,400 city staffers and everyone’s taken a 10 per cent pay cut. Libraries are closed three days a week. The police union recently suggested to the mayor that he close the libraries for the other four days.

By 2014, the mayor has calculated that the 10^th largest city in the U.S. will be served by 1,600 public workers. He says the future is not far off when the city will have a single employee, presumably with a focus on paying pensions.

“The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem,” says Lewis, reflecting on all that he’s witnessed as a financial disaster tourist. “It isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences.

“It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences.”

Three things will happen after you read Lewis’ road trip through the financial ruins of the new third world. You’ll want to send a thank you card to Jim Flaherty and ask if he’ll agree to a lifetime term as Canada’s Minister of Finance. You’ll start paying attention to the salaries, pay hikes, pension costs and liabilities for City of Hamilton workers and retirees. And you’ll be tempted to start burying gold bars in your backyard because the financial world appears to have a serious lack of parental supervision.

Book review: StandOut -- The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution

This review originally ran in the Oct. 11 edition of The Hamilton Spectator.

StandOut

By Marcus Buckingham

Thomas Nelson

$16.95

Michael Jordan the basketball player was arguably the best to ever play the game.

Jordan the baseball player? Not so much.

Air Jordan stunned the sports world when he retired during the 1993-94 season to pursue his dream of becoming a professional baseball player.

Jordan got off to an inauspicious start, hitting just .202 with the minor league Birmingham Barons.  By the end of the season, he was batting .252.

His manager said that with more work, Jordan could someday make it to The Show as a journeyman player.

After a less than stellar season in the minors, Jordan returned to basketball and led the Chicago Bulls to three more championships.

Jordan wisely opted to return to what author Marcus Buckingham calls our strengths zone. All of us have one. Within this zone is where we do our best work and do it better than the rest. It’s also where we’re our most innovative and productive.

“We each have specific areas where we consistently stand out, where we can do things, see things, understand things and learn things better and faster than ten thousand other people can,” says the leader of the strengths revolution.

Straying from our strengths zone can be problematic. Our stand out performance quickly deteriorates into something less than pedestrian. We go from being an all-star to journeyman player in a supporting role.

“This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment with new positions or stretch yourself with new challenges,” says Buckingham. “You should. But when you do, know that, consciously or not, you will bring your particular brand of genius with you.”

To find your zone, Buckingham has drawn on 20 years of research to come up with what he calls nine strength roles. These roles combine the most common and powerful themes related to talent.

There are advisor and connector roles. Equalizers and creators. Influencers and pioneers. Providers, stimulators and teachers. Two of these roles will be dominant in how we work with others and approach our work.

Buckingham defines each role and highlights when we’re at our most powerful in these roles. He suggests how to make an immediate impact, how to manage and lead and take your performance to the next level. There are also helpful pointers on what to watch out for so you don’t turn your strength into a weakness by alienating and annoying your colleagues, bosses and direct reports.

Through the wonders of an online assessment, Buckingham will reveal your top two roles. “These two strength roles are where you will make your greatest contribution. They are your edge – where you will have a natural advantage over everyone else. And they are your multiplier – you will most quickly learn and improve upon any innovations, techniques or best practices that complement these two roles.”

The assessment takes about 15 minutes to complete and walks you through a series of scenarios. For each scenario, you have 45 seconds to choose one of four possible responses.  There’s no right or wrong or obvious answers.  

To get a sense of the test, here’s one of the scenarios. A new teammate comes to you really excited about an idea she is sure will help your team excel. What do you do?

Do you run her idea by the rest of the team to see what they think?

Do you ask some challenging questions to see if she’s thought through her idea?

Do you highlight what’s great about the idea and help her build on it?

Or do you try out the idea and see if it works?

Buckingham says the assessment won’t reveal how well you know yourself. But it will reveal how you come across to others and when you’re at the top of your game. “When your read your results, keep your mind open to the possibility that, no matter how you see yourself, this is how others see you.”

Having read the book, I was pretty confident I knew my top two strength roles heading into the assessment. My test results told a different story, flagging two other roles that in hindsight are a pretty accurate read of my strengths.

If you’re not in the zone and clueless about what sets you apart, Buckingham can help you find your way. Knowing what you’re great at and playing to your strengths is your best bet for becoming an all-star at work and loving what you do for a living.

The choice is yours. You can spend more time at work doing the equivalent of highlight reel slam dunks from the free throw line or you can waste your time grounding out and striking out at the plate.

Book review: Cold Hard Truth on Business, Money and Life

Cold Hard Truth On Business, Money and Life

By Kevin O’Leary

Doubleday Canada

$29.95

A dead dream turned up in the basement last weekend.

Buried at the bottom of storage closet was a long forgotton box. Inside the box was the daily cartoon strip I drew for the school paper back in my university days.

Instead of going to class, I doodled. And instead of reading textbooks, I studied the collective works of Garry Trudeau, Bill Watterson and Berkley Breathed.

The strip was badly drawn and rarely clever. But sometimes I’d get in a shot at the sorority sisters and fraternity brothers who gave the Harvard of the North its well deserved reputation.

A few of my strips got taped to office doors, pinned to bulletin boards and were the target of angry letters to the editor.

For a time, I dreamed of becoming a full-time cartoonist. I’d create the next Calvin and Hobbs, Doonesbury or Bloom County. I'd be happy, rich and famous. 

But once I left the ivory tower, I quickly came to realize I wasn’t prepared to invest the time, pay the price and make the sacrifice on what was at best the longest of shots. I'd never be a great or successful cartoonist.

It’s the same conclusion that Kevin O’Leary reached with help from his stepfather George Kanawaty.

Before he was a successful entrepreneur, chair of his self-named investment fund company and media personality, O’Leary was a struggling teenager in search of direction back in the early 1970s. He harbored ambitions of being a photographer.

“In my last year of high school, George sat me down for the Talk About My Future,” says O’Leary. His stepfather asked O’Leary what he was willing to do in order to be a photographer.  Was he willing to pay the price?

“How much money do you think you’d need to make, every year, to be happy,” Kanawaty asked his stepson. O’Leary said $20,000.

Most photographers don’t make that much, Kanawaty said. Which meant O’Leary would need a full-time job with photography gigs on the side. He’d have to put up with jobs he didn’t enjoy to continue doing what he loved.  

Yet even at that early age, O’Leary knew he couldn’t work for someone else. He was meant to be an employer and not an employee. “What was I willing to do to make money while I honed my craft? Lay bricks? Work in retail? Clean garbage trucks? Plant trees? I’d done all those jobs. The idea of spending the rest of my life subsidizing a passion felt impossible, and because I had no postsecondary education, those were about the only jobs for which I was qualified. Without the drive to work at other jobs to support that passion, I had no chance of becoming a wealthy photographer.”

So O’Leary put that dream to rest, went to the University of Waterloo and got an MBA at Western. He credits his MBA with giving him a head start, some much needed discipline and a rolodex of classmate contacts that proved equal to the cost of tuition.

After graduation, O’Leary launched Special Events Television. The feather in the company’s cap was Don Cherry’s Grapevine, a half-hour program that premiered on CHCH-TV. Cherry followed a few golden rules for TV that O’Leary clearly took to heart. Never be boring. Never be small. Always be the antagonist because the good guy’s not interesting. And always get in the first and last words.

O’Leary sold his stake in the production company and got into the computer software business in the early 1980s. He started the company out of his basement with a $10,000 loan from his mother. The company took off, licensing software for pennies and bundling with printers which sold in the millions. The company sold its products in big box stores and retail giants like Wal-Mart, stayed flexible on pricing and put a heavy emphasis on product testing and package design.

The company was stamping so many CD-ROMs that one of the production runs delayed by four days the release of Michael Jackson’s album Bad. “Bad went on to sell about eight million copies that year, which should give you some idea of how big we were, and how fast we were growing,” O’Leary says.

A few years later, he sold the educational software giant for more than $3 billion.

O’Leary then looked at buying Report on Business Television. Instead of making a deal, the CEO put O’Leary in front of the camera and a star was born.  O’Leary now co-stars on Lang & O’Leary Exchange, Dragon’s Den – the number one Canadian produced TV show – and Shark Tank south of the border. He’s also chairman of O’Leary Funds, a money management firm.

“Whether I’m wearing the scales of a Dragon or the fins of a Shark, my message is consistent and clear: I want to go to bed richer than when I woke up,” says O’Leary. “By reinforcing that idea on my television shows, in books, on the radio and in newspapers and magazines, I’ve made making money my brand.”

According to O’Leary, entrepreneurs are the superheroes of capitalism. “Entrepreneurs do something governments can’t do: we inspire the next generation of wealth builders.”

 And he adds that the only thing money truly buys you is freedom.  “Freedom is a gift I’m grateful for every day. It is the result of a single-minded pursuit of the only thing that matters in business: money. I took great risks and made some hefty sacrifices to get here, and I’ll do whatever it takes to stay here. Because let me tell you, here is a very nice place.”

O’Leary’s book reads exactly like he talks on Dragon’s Den. He doesn't pull any punches. He’s also a consummate marketer so it’s no surprise he does a masterful job of telling his life story with the right mix of swagger and humility. You’ll gain a deeper appreciation for his business acumen, drive and determination. And if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or someone who’s debating whether to pursue your passion, you’ll get some invaluable advice and cold hard truth for the bargain price of just $29.95.

 

Book review: Triumph of the City

This review first ran in the Sept. 12 edition of The Hamilton Spectator.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier

By Edward Glaeser

Penguin Press

$37.50

As a Hamilton taxpayer, I’m less than thrilled that we’re picking up the $100,000 tab for the fiasco that was lingerie football at Copps Coliseum back in July.

And I’m not completely convinced that Festival of Friends needs a $100,000 handout from local taxpayers.

But I’d have no problem if $200,000 from the public purse paid for special events put on by Hamilton Hive.

The Hive brings together Hamilton’s new blood and young guns. It’s in the business of building networks among our city’s next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, small business owners, corporate leaders and civic boosters.

And it’s through these Hive-brokered conversations, connections and collaborations that we could finally fix Hamilton’s image problem and our never ending search for an identity. The Hive could prove to be a catalyst in building Hamilton’s reputation as the start-up capital of Canada. The best place and first choice for young, smart and savvy professionals looking to set up shop, launch a business, grow a company, raise a family and make their mark. 

Hamilton Hive is contributing to a key requirement for all successful cities, says author and Harvard University professor Edward Glaeser who believes the world isn’t so much flat as it is paved and urban. “To thrive, cities must attract smart people and enable them to work collaboratively. Cities thrive when they have many small firms and skilled citizens.”

So what’s it take to attract smart people and small firms? Glaeser says there are two competing visions. There’s the Richard Florida vision of chasing after the creative class by embracing the arts, celebrating alternative lifestyles and investing in a fun, happening downtown.  With a fondness for coffeehouses and public sculpture, Glaeser says it’s a vision that seems aimed at a 28-year-old wearing a black turtleneck and reading Proust.

The second vision of city building is boring by comparison, with a focus on doing a better job of being brilliant at the basics and delivering core public services like safe streets, fast commutes and good schools. It’s a vision built around meeting the needs of a 42-year-old biotech researcher concerned about whether her family will be as comfortable and their quality of life will be as good in Hamilton as they’d be in Toronto, Calgary or Vancouver.

With scarce resources, cities can’t afford to be everything for everyone. So which vision is best? Where should a city invest limited revenues and the energy of its leaders? While Glaeser supports subscribing to a bit of both visions, sticking to the basics is the best option for most cities on the rebound.

“There are roughly three times as many people in their thirties, forties and fifties as there are in their twenties, so it would be a mistake for cities to think that they can survive solely as magnets for the young and hip,” says Glaeser. “As much as I appreciate urban culture, aesthetic interventions can never substitute for the urban basics. A sexier place won’t bring many jobs if it isn’t safe. All the cafes in Paris won’t entice parents to put their kids in a bad public school system.”

Struggling cities confuse aesthetic interventions with urban basics and accelerate their decline. “Too many officials in troubled cities wrongly imagine that they can lead their city back to its former glories with some massive construction project – a new stadium or light rail system, a convention centre, or a housing project,” says Glaeser, who calls this the edifice complex.

It’s a blind belief that struggling cities can build themselves out of decline and that abundant new building leads to urban success even if the existing stock of housing and office space outstrips demand. “Successful cities typically do build, because economic vitality makes people willing to pay for space and builders are happy to accommodate. But building is the result, not the cause, of success. Overbuilding a declining city that already has more structures than it needs is nothing but folly.”

Glaeser says city planners and civic leaders need to be realistic and expect moderate successes rather than blockbusters. “Realism pushes toward small, sensible projects, not betting a city’s future on a vast, expensive roll of the dice. The real payoff of these investments in amenities lies in attracting the skilled residents who can really make a city rebound, especially if those residents can connect with the world economy. We must free ourselves from the tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete.”

Glaeser says municipal leaders have one overriding priority. “Ultimately, the job of urban government isn’t to fund buildings or rail lines that can’t possibly cover their costs, but to care for the city’s citizens. A mayor who can better educate a city’s children so that they can find opportunity on the other side of the globe is succeeding, even if his city is getting smaller.”

What cities must build first and foremost is their workforce. “There is no such thing as a successful city without human capital,” says Glaeser. Building that capital starts with kids and teens staying in school, getting a good education and going on to postsecondary. A highly educated, highly skilled workforce serves as the magnet that attracts employers with high skilled, high paying jobs. And those employers in turn attract even more highly skilled newcomers.

“The path back for declining industrial towns is long and hard,” warns Glaeser, who says Rust Belt cities built their economies around major employers that required low skilled labour. “Over decades, they must undo the cursed legacy of big factories and heavy industry. They must return to their roots as places of small-scale entrepreneurship and commerce. Apart from investing in education and maintaining core public services with moderate taxes and regulations, governments can do little to speed this process. Not every city will come back, but human creativity is strong, especially when reinforced by urban density.”

Glaeser’s case studies and histories of thriving and dying cities from around the world should be required reading for all Hamiltonians. His book also begs a question. We had no trouble taking $45 million out of the Hamilton Future Fund to rebuild a football stadium. What if we took another $45 million and covered the full costs of apprenticeship training, college diplomas and university degrees for every child in our Code Red neighbourhoods?  As Glaeser makes clear, educating our kids is a surefire way to fund a city’s future.